We Won't Move: A Living Archive

Announcing KSW’s First Podcast

Kearny Street Workshop’s newest podcast
We Won’t Move: A Living Archive illuminates Asian American art and dreaming
Season 1 launches March 9 and features interviews with
Thea Quiray Tagle, Estella Habal, and more
 

March 2, 2021, San Francisco, CA– On Tuesday, March 9, Kearny Street Workshop (KSW) launches We Won’t Move: A Living Archive, a podcast that brings radical Asian Pacific American (APA) artists, curators, and activists to the forefront. Once the anti–eviction rallying cry for the International Hotel in the 1970’s, We Won’t Move: A Living Archive features hosts Michelle Lin, Dara Katrina Del Rosario, and Kazumi Chin as they illuminate the legacies of intergenerational APA arts activism.

Through five episodes to be released every second and fourth Tuesday of the month, Chin, Lin, and Del Rosario affirm that our communities have always embodied self–determination and solidarity in the face of displacement, violence, and exclusion rooted in colonialism and imperialism that continue to exist today. Most recently, there has been an growth in Anti–Asian violence fueled by xenophobic, racist rhetoric from political leaders who have blamed the COVID–19 pandemic on Asian communities. Stop AAPI Hate has reported 2,808 hate crime incidents in 2020 with 700 having occurred in the San Francisco/Bay Area. 

We Won’t Move is a demand for these truths to be taken seriously. It is a demand that we challenge the very notion that confines of history remain relegated to the past. It is a demand that we be allowed, at once, to remember, and to dream,” says Kazumi Chin. 

As organizations, arts workers, and community members come together in solidarity, We Won’t Move: A Living Archive asserts that the intersection of arts and activism build pathways to more just and equitable futures. 

Season one features interviews that assert the importance of connection with one another, our histories, and our futures. Thea Quiray Tagle, curator of YBCA’s AFTERLIFE (we survived), celebrates the ways Black, Indigenous, people of color have always carved out space for their dreams to exist without compromise. Artist and researcher Erina C. Alejo discusses their latest book, “A Hxstory of Renting”, an archival project that documents San Francisco residents surviving an increasingly inequitable housing landscape. International Hotel organizer and professor Estella Habal grounds us in the importance of caring for ourselves and one another as we move toward collective liberation, and renowned dancer Lenora Lee explores how art can help us reckon with unsettling pasts. 

“It’s such a gift to sit down with these powerful APA artists and organizers, and to talk deeply about their work, the fire behind it, their dreams. Our community holds multitudes and this podcast, as a living archive, must do that as well by keeping it multigenerational and multidisciplinary,” shares Michelle Lin. 

Each episode will be released on the second and fourth Tuesday of every month and will be available for streaming on the Kearny Street Workshop website, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and other streaming services.

We Won’t Move: A Living Archive

Season One Interviewees
Erina Alejo
Estella Habal
Thea Quiray Tagle
Lenora Lee

About the Hosts

Michelle Lin is a literary and mixed media artist who serves as the Northern California Regional Co-Chair of Kundiman and as co curator of Kearny Street Workshop’s key reading series KSW Presents. She works to build radically loving and transformative spaces with Asian Pacific American, LGBTQIA+, and BIPOC artists.

Dara Katrina Del Rosario is a non profit arts professional and curator whose practice is rooted in Community Cultural Wealth and Critical Performance Pedagogy. Her recent projects include Postcolonial Revenge (co curator, 2019), From My Body (co curator, 2019), Passionate Engagement: The Art of Nancy Hom (exhibition coordinator, 2019), and Liwanag vol. 1 relaunch (steering committee, 2019). 

Kazumi Chin is a poet, scholar, educator, and student of Cultural Studies at the University of California, Davis. Their work examines the way contemporary Asian American artists make legible the carceral histories and geographies of San Francisco, creating space for us to differently experience, remember, and imagine the history of this city, grounded in an abolitionist perspective.
About Kearny Street Workshop
Founded in 1972, during the height of the Asian American cultural movement, Kearny Street Workshop (KSW) is the oldest Asian Pacific American multidisciplinary arts organization in the country. Through collaborations with other arts organizations and cultural communities, both locally and nationally, KSW provides a forum for Asian American artists of different media to reach a wide, diverse audience. KSW offers classes and workshops, salons, and student presentations, as well as professionally curated and produced exhibitions, performances, readings, and screenings.

PodcastJason Bayani